


The Wheel

by scioscribe



Category: The Dead Zone - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Psychic Abilities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-11-04 12:44:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20616296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Sarah's gift is darker and quieter than Johnny's, but it's just as useful.





	The Wheel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cyphomandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyphomandra/gifts).

Somewhere else, some other time, Sarah goes to the county fair in Esty (ABSOLUTELY THE LAST AGRICULTURAL FAIR OF THE YEAR IN NEW ENGLAND) with Dan. They’ve been married for only a few months, but already this date feels like a throwback, as if being in love under the buzzing array of candy-colored lights is something they have, truthfully, outgrown. There are fantasies Sarah can share with Dan, but this isn’t one of them. She loves these fairs, but Dan doesn’t—and at just twenty-three, with her finger not yet green from her cheap wedding ring, Sarah is beginning to realize, or to allow herself to know, that Dan loves very little. Maybe even nothing at all.

He had a coldly amused, tolerant look in his heavy-lidded eyes when he agreed to the county fair; he was tapping his cigarette against the ashtray. Sure, babe, if that’s the way you want it. The way a parent might agree to buy rainbow jimmies for the ice cream instead of chocolate—the indulgence of a silly little opinion about something that doesn’t really matter anyway.

And besides, Dan can drink at the fair.

Sarah pays for it all, conscious of that same cool look on the back of her neck as she picks through her pocketbook.

“You can root around in there as long as you like,” Dan says. “It’s not gonna make me decide to shell out for any of this. This was your idea.”

“I know,” Sarah says, flushing. “That’s not what I’m doing. I’m just looking for change. But you could be a little nicer.” How’s that for a token protest?

“That’d be a bad habit to get into just now, don’t you think?” They pass into the whip—her favorite ride at any fair, though right now it feels like all she can notice is the paint peeling on the floor of their little car—and once they’re settled in, Dan puts his arm around her. Sarah still likes the heaviness of his body and the way, enveloped in it, she can smell the faint sandalwood smell of his cologne.

Niceness would be a bad habit in Vietnam, Dan means, and perhaps he’s right. That’s still on his horizon, creeping closer every day. Their wedding delayed his orders, but the war is, as far as Sarah is concerned, a thresher that chews up boys and men so quickly it’s always hungry for more. Dan has two weeks at the outside before the machine eats him too.

She shivers underneath his arm. She hates to think about what’s coming for them.

He reminded her on purpose. She knows that.

The smell of sandalwood. Flashing lights. The whip curves and cracks and spins, making Sarah feel like her head might come right off her shoulders. With Dan, she doesn’t laugh and scream, the way she used to with her friends. She just holds the bar across their laps and watches her knuckles turn whiter and whiter.

_You can get a little hairline fracture when you’re a kid, _something in Sarah’s head whispers. _Just the tiniest crack in your life. Like if you fall on the ice. And then the whip jolts you—and you fly free—for better or for worse, just like a marriage.  
_

Sarah thinks, _I want to get off_, but there’s the bar and there’s Dan’s arm and the ride is, of course, already in motion. There are things that can’t be stopped after you start them.

But that’s not true of everything.

They stay until the fair starts to close down. Sarah has this _feeling_, like an itch on the roof of her mouth, and so she parcels out her quarters carefully. There’s the Ferris wheel, where they kiss at the top, more frantically than she thinks either of them suspected they would. Dan’s hand slips under her skirt and works between her legs, making her groan; their sex has problems, sure, but _God_, its ability to get her hot has never been one of them. There are more rides, dangerous gimcrack ones that creak and moan beneath them. There are hot dogs and beer and funnel cakes.

And then there is the mirror maze, which Sarah goes through alone.

Such places have always felt haunted to her—if not by ghosts, then at least by fantasies. Ray Bradbury, the poet laureate of American childhood, knew that: the mirror maze is dark and wondrous, full of black velvet and diamond-sharp winks of light in the gloom. And most of all, it is full of Sarahs, endless Sarahs, distorted and doubled. The light gives her reflections subtly different shades, tinting their eyes and changing the color of their clothes.

When she stumbles out, ten minutes later, she almost feels like she’s drunk.

She puts her arm through Dan’s as they leave, but he lets her go as they pass by the Wheel of Fortune. The wheel spins in Dan’s eyes, mirrored there in red and black. Endless Wheels for the endless Sarahs.

“Oh, Dan, no,” she says. “It’s such a waste of money.”

That feeling she’s had since the whip is coalescing into something, some instinct or power—she spends her days teaching the children of Cleaves Mills about literature, but now, with the cool October wind against her bare legs and the rustle of leaves and crumpled-up wax paper food wrappers in her ears, she knows that this is as close as she’s ever come to understanding what that art feels like from the other side. It’s a power and she’s the line it thrums along. She feels her way along this with some high-octane combination of instinct and insight, searching for what she can only describe as the iambic pentameter of the moment, of Dan, and of the wheel itself. She’s crafting something, like a villanelle or a limerick, that will end a certain way because of what she does now.

She knows Dan hates being cautioned. Being told what to do.

“The rest of this was the waste, Sarah,” he says, and he steps up to the wheel.

He makes the barker a little nervous—the man makes his living off suckers, and he’s smart enough to know right away that suckering Dan might have its consequences—but the game starts up anyhow.

Dan hits a hot streak so inexplicable she almost wonders—or almost would wonder, on another night—if the man behind the wheel is actually scared enough of him to rig it in his favor. Her stomach has started clenching and rolling—_hot dog’s barking, must have gotten a bad one_—but she presses her lips together to keep herself from making even the smallest of sounds. The rhyme and rhythm of this moment of their lives is still hazy, but bit by bit, spin after spin, it becomes a little clearer.

_Yes, _she thinks as Dan places another winning bet. _Yes, that one too. And that one. That’s right._

Until Dan says, “What the hell, put it all on red,” and Sarah _knows_.

It’s wrong. It won’t be red. It’ll be nineteen, which is black.

It isn’t about whether or not Dan takes home the money. He won’t, no matter what she does; if she tells him to put it on nineteen or even just on black, if she begs him to, he’ll still stay where he is. If she gives into the roiling sickness in her belly and pleads with him to take her home, he will—but only after this one last spin. But she could try to save him. That’s the choice she has.

_Johnny wins the money, not Dan, _she thinks, without knowing what she means. _Johnny wins on nineteen, which is black._

But the wheel doesn’t come up nineteen any more than it comes up red.

“Double-zero,” the barker chants, “double-zero, house number, house number, everybody loses. Everything off the board. So sorry, folks.”

And Sarah throws up.

***

Seven months later, a somber middle-aged man in a uniform comes to her door to tell her that her husband has been killed in Vietnam.

Sarah thanks him for this information, aware that a kind of icy shock has descended over her—heavy, like Dan’s arm, and scented with sandalwood. She knows she’s flubbing the part of the grieving new widow, but she also knows, with an insight she wouldn’t have had before the fair in Esty, that the man in the uniform has seen stranger things. He has one more wife and two mothers to notify today, and by the time he reaches his car, he’ll have already forgotten Sarah’s face.

She knows this like she knows that Dan visited two brothels in Vietnam, the way she knows he caught gonorrhea after the last one. She knows he let one of his buddies scar him with a primitive tattoo that looks like something you’d get on a cellblock. The tattoo was infected when he died, a red throb on his bicep. She knows his last thoughts were not of her, but that he did, in fact, jerk off to a fantasy of her two nights beforehand, a thing she finds oddly and inexplicably touching.

He spun the wheel that night at the fair, and he laid his money down. And Sarah saw the shape of things to come, saw that the spin was a guaranteed loss—and did nothing. And she knows that while she's sorry now, she won't be sorry for long.

She saw the shape of her and Dan’s marriage, too.

***

A year after Dan’s death, Sarah marries Johnny Smith, one of her fellow teachers at Cleaves Mills, a man so unlike Dan it’s hard to believe they ever existed on the same planet at the same time. Johnny is funny, sweet, and plain, rubbery-faced in his expressiveness and silliness, loyal and caring to his students.

And Johnny gets flashes—little intuitions he says he’s always had. He can find her wedding ring when she briefly loses it in the hotel bathroom on their honeymoon, and he can tell, well before the sonogram does, that their first child will be a girl. Johnny is the one who decides, last-minute, that they shouldn’t risk a drive on an icy day that later turns out to break a town record for car accidents. Johnny is a lifesaver, frankly, and Sarah thinks often about how much she loves him and how lucky she is to have him.

Her own gift, she knows, is something darker. Johnny gets tips—Sarah still wakes up sometimes in the middle of the night, the sheets tangled around her, thinking, _He was there, he won, he put it all on nineteen, Jesus Christ, no one ever saw a streak like that before in their life_—but Sarah gets, in some obscure way, to collect on the losses. She creates a third house number out of the ether, a kind of triple zero, and then she waits for the wheel.

***

Johnny takes a few days around Christmas one year to go see his parents—he takes their daughter with him but allows Sarah to, as he puts it with a grin, weasel out, since his mother has never warmed to her. He asks her what she’ll do and she hems and haws—putter around the house, mostly, she says, maybe get an early start taking down the decorations, maybe just do some reading in all the peace and quiet he’s giving her.

He groans. “I’m jealous,” he says, and kisses her. "Mom's cold shoulder has its benefits. I should have planned ahead and been a heathen ex-Catholic myself."

"That would have been a neat trick, considering who raised you," Sarah says dryly.

She kisses him again. He tastes like butterscotch from the last of the Christmas cookies, butterscotch and apple cider, and the sweetness of him makes her toes curl. She thinks it’s about time they started on baby number two.

But on one of the days he’s gone, Sarah takes a day and drives to New Hampshire, to the casino in Nashua. She wears a tight, low-cut black dress she impulsively bought three years ago, before Becca was born—it seemed mildly scandalous to her even then. Now, a mother and a wife on a sudden secretive day trip, it feels more scandalous still. If anyone she knows ever saw her in this—

But she needs this one man to notice her, because even if she doesn’t know who he is, she knows the stakes. She can feel them. The hairline fracture of destiny she got on the whip tells her, just like the ache in a broken bone sometimes tells a person when it's going to rain. And this dress is the best she has. In it, she looks young and estranged from herself—her eyes dark and wide, her body highlighted by the clingy black fabric. She looks like a woman without a history.

Greg Stillson finds her. When their night together starts, he’s playing craps, and he has her blow on his dice; he’s the most charming man she’s ever met, far more so than Johnny, never mind Dan, but his smile never touches his eyes. That does make her think of Dan, but it's not hard to see the difference between them. Dan was cold, and that coldness served as its own kind of implacable control. Greg Stillson’s eyes have a hot red fleck of incipient madness in them, and he sports the automatically friendly aw-shucks smile of someone who is used to the situation around him getting out of hand.

Sarah nudges him towards roulette. She’s there when he gets his hot streak. And standing on the casino floor, her head aching from the slot machine chimes and the flashing lights, her neutral-shading-to-impressed look plastered firmly into place, she knows she’s at the end of the villanelle. When what she came there to do is done, she feels it immediately, like someone’s turned off a circuit breaker inside of her. The image of his smile, which someone someday would have called the most famous grin in American history, fades out.

She’s already walking away from Greg Stillson when she hears the call.

_And that’s the house number, folks._

***

Johnny and Becca come home just two days after Sarah’s little trip to New Hampshire. Becca is cranky from the long car trip, which was made even longer than it should have been, Johnny wearily explains, by the huge pileup on the road. There was an accident, he says, with one car smashed up like an accordion.

Sarah doesn’t need to ask who was in it.

“And there I was, sort of frantically singing Beatles songs to keep Becks from looking out the window, because it was _bad_, Sarah. I’d never seen anything like that before, not in my whole life.” He sighs and slumps against her, his long body folding over hers, his head against her shoulder. “And my mom—well, let’s just say I’m up-to-date on all the recent quote-unquote discoveries about Atlantis. I don’t know if there’s anything we can do to pull her out of tail-spinning like this.”

“Shh,” Sarah says, wrapping her arms around him. “We’ll figure it out.”

“She thinks the world’s going to end, Sarah.”

Sarah shakes her head, knowing he’ll feel her hair moving against his chin. “It won’t,” she says. “Not anytime soon.”


End file.
